Academic Quotes

I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.

Spin' is a polite word for deception. Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just 'spinning a yarn' - by making things up.

Anger can be borne - it can even be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without these means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of stream - building to an impotent, murderous rage.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden
The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

The pleasure of their [the Imagists'] poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little, but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words.

Science doesn't merely empower us, as in seeding better technologies; it also helps prevent trouble in the first place. Knowledge can be like a vaccine, immunizing you against false fears and bad moves.

William H. Calvin
William H. Calvin
Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.

Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman
We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Philip Shuttleworth
Philip Shuttleworth
Woman: I am surprised that you are not fighting to defend civilization.
Garrod: Madam, I am the civilization they are fighting to defend.

This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.

If I want to be truly happy, I have to be a part of state action - a civil servant.

There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms.

Legislation should outlaw an advertiser's attempts to use its economic relationships with a media enterprise to influence the enterprise not to print or broadcast content that it would otherwise choose to present.... There is little reason to allow this use of economic power to censor others' speech and to block the public's access to information or viewpoints.

Many years ago I heard a paper read by a colleague who was very philosophically astute and informed. The paper was on ethics, and it was rigorously argued, proper distinctions were made, and the critique of other points of view was cogent.... When my colleague finished his paper the man chairing the meeting said, "That's not ethics. Ethics has to do with prophecy. I learned that from Rabbi Abraham Heschel."

Our library has the most effective search engines yet invented—librarians who are highly skilled at ferreting out the uniquely useful references you need.

William R. Brody
William R. Brody
It was a great game, and exciting and dramatic and even at times tragic - but funny it emphatically was not.

John Masterman
John Masterman
So at bottom Foucault's enterprise seems stuck on the horns of a huge epistemological dilemma: if it tells the truth, then all knowledge is suspect in its pretense of objectivity; but in that case, how can the theory itself vouch for its truth? It's like the famous paradox about the Cretean Liar—and Foucault seemed quite unable to get out of it (which explains why he didn't even try to face it).

José Guilherme Merquior
José Guilherme Merquior
I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.

The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state's role.... Robert Hale... demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impose. Hale trained our attention on the foundational rules of property and contract law, showing how free, voluntary, compensated exchange is in fact a product of the legal coercion that the government establishes through its role in defining property rights.

In every artist we can perceive a man with both a message and a method. His message may be innate in him, but his method he has to acquire from others.

Brander Matthews
Brander Matthews
The most important fact in the environmental history of Australia is that it had a radically new technology imposed upon it, suddenly, twice.

The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female.... The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

The optimism of politics before a revolution is exceeded only by the pessimism of politics after one.

This book is a product of my long-standing interest in questions relating to institutions and their relation in economic life. Initially, this interest took me to the study of the American institutionalist tradition (now often called the "old" institutional economics, or OIE) and to a series of articles on Veblen, Mitchell, Commons and Ayres (Rutherford 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1987), a line of work I have continued to pursue (1990a, 1990c, 1992a, 1992b). These pieces are written from the point of view of a sympathetic critic.